


Camp Goddard

by madwriteson



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Marcus Cutter is a gross old man
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25116565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson
Summary: Isabel Lovelace is coming back for her second year as a counselor at Camp Goddard. Unfortunately, none of her friends from last year got hired back, and all of these new counselors are super annoying... even—especially?—that handsome butch girl who caught her eye the first day and who turned out to be even more rules-bound than Sam Lambert ever was.But with the director of the camp, Marcus Cutter, paying an uncomfortable amount of attention to her, Isabel finds herself turning to Renée Minkowski for help in keeping him off her back. And maybe, just maybe, Renée isn't nearly as annoying as Isabel thought she was.
Relationships: Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Started as a trope mashup meme on Tumblr: https://madtumbleson.tumblr.com/post/613291377463279616/summer-camp-fake-dating-for-the-trope-mashup

Isabel Lovelace slid out of the car and on to the grounds of Camp Goddard with just a hint of trepidation. She’d only found out last week that none of the other counselors she’d made friends with last year had been re-hired, which meant that the plan she’d had to make this summer just like last one, only _funner,_ had been completely scotched. But she refused to be _too_ nervous, even if none of the other cars in the parking lot seemed to belong to other parents dropping their teenagers off for counselor training.

Her dad got out of the car and looked around with a frown. “This is the right day, isn’t it?”

“I’m pretty sure.” When her dad shot her a look, she raised her hands defensively. “Hey, you read the same email I did. I’m going to go check in with Mr. Clarke.” She could see a sliver of what she thought was the man’s shining and neatly parted hair through the window of the nearby administration building.

“Want me to come with you?”

“I’ll be fine, dad! Geez.” Isabel rolled her eyes at her overprotective parent. “I’ll be right back.”

Clarke looked up at Isabel’s knock on the door, and then down at the schedule in front of him. “Ah, yes. Miss Lovelace.” He snagged a little envelope from some part of the desk she couldn’t see and held it out to her. “You’re Hephaestus cabin group again this year. Report in at the big cabin at 4 for counselor training, and...” as Isabel took the envelope, he reached under his desk and pulled out a basket full of cell phones in a wide variety of colorful cases. “New policy, I’m afraid. Cell phones get turned in now, and you can get them back at the end of the summer.”

“Oh. Uh, sure, I guess.” Isabel dug her phone out of her pocket, scanned over it one last time for any important notifications, and turned it off before putting it in the basket. It wasn’t as if there was even reception on the camp grounds most of the time—everyone usually used walkie talkies to communicate—but giving her phone up left her with a sense of unease. “You haven’t set up a cell phone smuggling ring or something, right? I’ll get it back?” She tried to make the questions sound like a joke, but they came out anxious even to her.

“Of course.” Clarke had already stowed the basket of cell phones away and had turned to the ancient computer on his desk with a frown. “Any updates to your emergency contact information from last year?”

“Nope. Should all be the same.”

“You have your signed waiver form?”

Isabel silently handed the piece of paper over. Clarke took it, scanned it for signatures, and shoved it in a drawer.

“Remember to take your medical forms to Mr. Hilbert,” he said, waving her off.

Isabel made a face at Clarke’s prim profile and left the office.

“Everything good?” her dad asked.

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “They’ve put a ban on cell phones this year.”

Her dad frowned at that, but all he said was “Want me to hang on to yours for you?”

“Nah, I already turned it in.”

Her dad’s frown got a little bit deeper at that. “I’ll have a talk with him before I leave.”

Isabel rolled her eyes. “It’s not worth complaining about. They’ve got land lines.”

Her dad raised his eyebrows. “And you know my number?”

She rattled it off to him.

“Okay, fine, I believe you! I just don’t want anything like last summer to happen again.”

Last summer, when she’d broken her arm in a zip-line accident in the last week of the program and it had taken them seven hours to get around to calling her parents to let them know what had happened. “Well, I was too out of it to call you even if we _did_ get reception out here, and I left it in the cabin anyway,” she argued. “And Hilbert took good care of me.” Mr. Hilbert, the camp nurse, had insisted she needed a hospital when Mr. Cutter had tried to play the whole thing off as a bruised arm, and had driven her there himself, and even had stayed there with her until she had been put in a cast, reading her excerpts from the Star Trek novel he’d been reading at the time to help her keep her mind off the pain.

He’d yelled the nurses into giving her proper painkillers, too, which she really appreciated, even if she _had_ spent the day between then and when her dad had been able to come and pick her up half-unconscious on her bunk.

“I promise not to break my arm this year,” she added with a laugh.

Her dad didn’t smile, but at least his frown went away, and he held his hands up defensively. “So maybe I’m in overprotective parent mode. Can you blame me?”

“What are you going to do when I go to college next year?”

“Don’t remind me, I don’t even want to think about it,” her dad said gruffly. He opened the trunk and pulled out her duffle bag. “Where are you this year?”

“Hephaestus cabins again.”

“And they’re…?”

Isabel rolled her eyes again. “Come on.”

In the end, she only shooed her dad off by telling him she needed him out of her hair if she was going to have time to turn her med forms in to Hilbert before it was time to go to the staff meeting. The fact that she hadn’t seen any of the other high school counselors yet was starting to weird her out, though; based on that basket full of phones, she would have expected to have run in to at least some of them over near the cabins, but the entire camp complex had a strange, abandoned feel to it. It was almost a relief to make her way over to the nurse’s station and to find Hilbert sitting behind his desk with that metal med kit hung up on the wall behind him, leaning back in his chair and reading one of those trashy sci-fi novels he liked so well.

He blinked nearsightedly over the top of his glasses at her. “Isabel. I did not think you would be returning this year.”

“Can’t get rid of me,” she said with a smile, waving her medical forms in his direction.

“Hm.” He took the forms and scanned them, asking “How is the arm?” as he did.

“Healed up perfectly.” Not entirely true; she still sometimes got a twinge from it. But true enough. “Why did you think I wouldn’t come back? I had a great time last year.”

He looked at her over the top of his glasses again and raised one nonexistent eyebrow dubiously at her.

“I did! You know, if you ignore that whole breaking my arm thing.”

“Of course.” He opened a drawer and filed the forms away. “Everything looks in order.” And then he looked sharply up at her. “I did not think you would be back because the other counselors have been on site for two days, and Mr. Cutter did not say anything about returning counselors this year.”

“Two days?” Isabel felt her stomach drop. “What? Why would they—“

“Everyone else is new,” Hilbert said with a shrug. “They needed more extensive training.”

Which made sense, but the thought that she was the _only_ returning counselor was more upsetting than she had expected. She’d been resigned to not seeing any of the friends she had made last year again, but there had definitely been a sharp division between returning counselors and new ones the year before, and the thought of being on her own entirely… well, it wasn’t a good feeling, that was all. At least that explained why the parking lot had been so empty, and why no one had been in the cabins; they’d be in one of the training meetings right now, most likely.

“I am certain you will make new friends,” Hilbert said in a conciliatory fashion.

“Yeah. Sure.” And probably he was right.

But that didn’t make her feel any more hopeful about the prospect.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Cutter is really gross and Isabel decides she's probably just making a fuss over nothing.

There were definitely voices coming from inside the big cabin when Isabel got there. Well, _a_ voice at least; it sounded like the camp’s director, Mr. Cutter, was droning on (and on and on) about something that wasn’t important at all—the mission statement of Camp Goddard or something like that. She could have probably identified what he was talking about from outside the door if she’d really been interested, given how loud Mr. Cutter was, but she hadn’t paid all that much attention to his boring speeches last year, and she definitely didn’t envy the people who had to sit through them this year at all.

She cracked the door open and peeked in, only meaning to take a look at who was in there and what they were doing, but when every head in the place whipped around to look at the door as it creaked she committed and shoved it the rest of the way open before stepping inside.

“Ah, Isabel,” Mr. Cutter said, turning last of all, a thin smile on his handsome face. “ _So_ good of you to join us.” He turned to the crowd of other counselors in the room. “Everyone, this is Isabel Lovelace. She’s senior counselor this year, and will be here to answer any questions you have about how we do things here at Camp Goddard.”

“Hey,” Isabel said, forcing a smile on to her face and trying not to show any surprise at this. She certainly hadn’t been told that she was going to have a senior role. She hadn’t even realized that senior counselor was a role the camp had. She waved at the room in general. “Nice to meet you all.”

“Yes, yes. I’m sure you can all introduce yourselves to one another later. For now, the rest of you can go do whatever you want until dinner.” He waved airily at the other counselors, and, in a dazed group, they got to their feet and stumbled towards the door of the big cabin. Isabel stepped to one side and let them pass, looking them over as they went by. One of them in particular caught Isabel’s eye—a big girl with brown skin and reddish-brown hair cut short and dapper, taller even than Isabel herself, broad-shouldered and thick-thighed. She seemed to hold herself differently, too, in a way that made even the terrible button-up shirts the counselors were required to wear look almost stylish.

Well. Maybe this summer wouldn’t be entirely terrible.

The last of the other counselors filed out. “Close the door, Isabel.”

Mr. Cutter’s voice was strangely soft in a way that gave her the creeps, but Isabel closed the door at his behest. “Sir.”

“Now, Isabel, no need for all this… formality between us. You can call me _Marcus_.”

For some reason that was more discomfiting than his request that she close the door. “I’d rather not.”

He shrugged, as if to say “Ah well,” and gestured to the empty folding chair directly in front of him, which, as she watched, he hooked the toe of his shoe under to pull it forward until it was uncomfortably close to the chair he was seated in. “Come have a seat. Let’s have… a little _chat_.”

Mr. Cutter had always struck her as kind of weird, but right now… well, Isabel didn’t know if it was just what was left of her unease from earlier that afternoon that was making her feel so uncomfortable, when she’d arrived at the camp to find everything weirdly deserted, but she didn’t like anything about this. She had to force herself to cross the room to Mr. Cutter, and swung the chair he had indicated around, straddling it with her arms crossed protectively across the back rather than sitting in it the usual way. It made her feel a little safer, having that flimsy barrier of the chair back between her and Mr. Cutter.

For some reason he laughed softly as she did this, and that didn’t help the sense of unease either. And his smile, sharp and brittle… ugh. Had he been this strange last year? She supposed she’d never been alone with the man last year; she’d been part of the giant crowd of first-year counselors, all of them receiving their training at the same time, all of them forming their little cliques by cabin group.

But this year, she was alone.

“So. Isabel.” He clapped his hands together suddenly, and she tried not to jump and mostly failed. He smiled again, as if startling her had been his entire purpose for doing so. “You’re our senior counselor this year!”

Isabel swallowed, trying to loosen a throat made strangely tight. “Yeah, about that. Some warning would have been nice?”

Mr. Cutter dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “You know how we do things here, so there’s no need for further training, but if you need anything—“ and at this he leaned forward and set his hand on Isabel’s knee, a move that sent a shudder down her spine “—you just let me know,” he finished, that extremely fake smile of his stretching the corners of his mouth wider. An instant later and he was sitting back, his hand no longer on her knee, and she almost would have thought she’d imagined it if it weren’t for the way his sweaty palm had left a sheen of moisture there.

“Are there, like, additional duties that go with the position?” Isabel asked, her mouth feeling very dry.

“Oh, nothing much. Just a few extra tasks here or there,” Mr. Cutter said airily. “We’ll let you know as you’re needed for them. And of course, you’ve got authority over the others. If they’re not keeping themselves in line, well, your job is to do it for us.” And then he reached out and patted her other knee, three times in swift succession. “Now why don’t you run along and go _introduce_ yourself?”

Isabel could not get out of there fast enough. She stammered an awkward goodbye and fled for the door of the big cabin, breaking into a run once she was past its doors, pounding down the beaten dirt path towards the residential cabins as fast as she could, trying to escape how violated she felt. And it wasn’t as if he had done anything too strange—she tried to ignore the way the skin on her kneecaps was crawling—but it had just felt _wrong_.

At least he seemed to mostly keep to the administration cabins once the camp was really in full swing. For a man who ran a summer camp for children, he really didn’t seem to like them all that much, and avoided being around them as much as possible. Probably a good thing, given what she’d just experienced.

Nah. He ran a summer camp. He couldn’t _really_ be like that, could he? Someone would have reported him if he were. She’d just been on edge, and had taken it all the wrong way. He had probably just been trying to be friendly. Sometimes adults got weird, when they tried to talk to teenagers, and overstepped in weird ways. That had to be it.

But she’d try not to be alone with him again, just in case.


End file.
